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Dan Aykroyd and John Landis: how we made The Blues Brothers
Aug 3, 2020
Dan Aykroyd, actor (played Elwood)
My original script was called The Return of the Blues Brothers and had two movies in it. John Landis turned it into a manageable 150 pages. He was the keystone of the project – he pulled it all together.
Landis wrote the “ four fried chickens and a coke” scene after seeing John Belushi [who played the other Blues Brother “Joliet” Jake] consume four fried chickens. Elwood’s dry white toast came from when I grew up in Ottawa and moved from my parents’ place – my toaster was a coat hanger on a stovetop. That was an old trick. We were inspired by John Lee Hooker’s House of the Blues record – he had the suit and the shades. Who wouldn’t want to look that cool? We put on a suit and tie and ended up looking like FBI agents. It was a universal look that worked so well.
I remember coming into the diner with Aretha Franklin’s backup dancers when we were shooting her number, Think. My legs, stomach and solar plexus turned to jelly when she started to sing. Honestly, I didn’t know how I was going to get up from the stool and do the moves.
We lost John one night. But it wasn’t because he was high, it was because he was hungry and didn’t like what was available to eat on set. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Finally, I saw this path going through a parking lot and into a nearby neighbourhood so I followed it. The neighbourhood was dark except for one house. I knock on the door and say, “Excuse me, we’re shooting a movie and missing one of our actors.” The guy goes, “Oh, Belushi? He came in about an hour ago, raided my fridge and crashed on my couch.”
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